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Cos I DON’T wanna be Anarchy

You know that famous British punk band called “Sex pistols” ?
Yes – Ace!
No – Well, get to know them! :>
Anyway, for those of you who are not familiar with them, here’s a little something:

As you can see, there is torn up Union Jack and a badge saying “Anarchy in the U.K.” next to the band’s name.

But where am I aiming with that? Well, the answer is actually rather simple – swap “the U.K.” (nothing personal, Britain, honestly) with “Free Software” and you will get cookies. … All right, you are not getting cookies (or cake for that matter!!!!!!), but rather “Anarchy in Free Software”.
See, I’ve been in the whole Free Software world for quite a lot of time and worked (and still working) on enough projects to learn that sadly in not that small amount of them there is some a la anarchy status, because no one actually steps up to say “I will lead this project and I will take the decisions.” especially when it comes to the design.
You know, some people tend to accuse Mark Shuttleworth for being too much of a dictator and Canonical for being too … strict, but the fact is that Ubuntu would have never been as successful as it is today without the strong leadership.
There is a person or a team of such behind every application out there (well … duh) and unless you are part of such team and want the project to fail miserably your team has to make decisions. Sometimes they might be tough, sometimes they maybe easy, sometimes they might require to have a discussion with the userbase of your application, but you have to take them, otherwise you risk accepting ALL the contributions, which results in what we hear in Bulgaria call (caution – might be really hard to pronounce for non Slavic speakers) – “Mnou babi, hilavo djate”, which translates as “A lot of grandmoms, spoiled kiddoh.” … and just be glad I didn’t write that in cyrillic … :>
You know, it’s ace to see community contributions (no matter if they will be design suggestions or branches with code or a feature request) to your application, no I lied, actually it’s brill, but you can’t just accept them all without going through every of them and evaluating and if you have to discussing it, simply because saying no might hurt someone’s feelings.
You have to evaluate every design and code contribution or a feature request, discuss it with the other team members and if you have to with the contributor himself, before making the call.
Being ignorant jerk that says “To hell with everything, I’m gonna go giddy on power” is a big no no, but accepting everything is just as bad and sometimes even worse.
So, to sum it up: